How Experts Learn Faster

I’ve often thought of the code of itself as not being valuable, but the people who have a mental map of that codebase as bringing the value.

Reading through Jimmy Koppel’s explanation of The Benjamin Franklin Method, I could relate his exposition to that thought:

Expertise is a process of building mental representations; expert minds store knowledge in a compressed fashion. … This is possible because music and chess positions have structure that makes them look very different from a page of random notes or a random permutation of pieces. Technically speaking, they have lower perplexity than random noise. So, even though there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, Claude Shannon showed that the information content of English is about 1 bit per letter: given a random prefix of a paragraph, people can guess the next letter about half the time.

I don’t think there is a practical takeaway directly - very few read programming books nowadays. But it still illuminates how the better ones amongst us end up being more effective. The mental representations they form (whether of language, music, chess, or code) are better!